My people live on the shores of the Salt Sea, but this story is not about them. This is about me.

  I’m Rworg, the warrior of my people. I was told I can’t channel. Shaping mana does not come naturally to any man. For me, it did not come at all. So I practiced other things while waiting. Poetry. Storytelling. Swordcraft.

  I excelled in all of them, except swordcraft.

  In that, I was unparalleled.

  Yet, I was not content. I wanted to learn magic, like everyone else, so I left. I was also young, hungry to do something that I couldn’t. Like you now.

  I had a decision to make. To the east was the sea, the real sea. A foggy horizon from which no boat ever returns. No one knows what is inside or beyond the fog. I was a fool, but not an idiot. I did not go there.

  From the sea, the clouds billow to the north. They promise rain, but the water never touches the sand. I followed them, white in the sky and flowing over the white of the dunes, to the true desert. The sand there is laced with salt and shells of tiny sea creatures. The Crunch, it’s called.

  ”For real?” Finna asks.

  “It does crunch,” Mandollel says, shrugging.

  For my part, I concentrate on listening to catch everything. Rworg’s accent is thick and the words occasionally hard to make out, but the story sounds like some kind of percussion music. Staccato rhythm of words, tied together like pearls on a string. He’s really into the telling, sitting eyes closed with arms crossed before his chest.

  The white can blind. Many have fallen from the heat, stumbled from lack of shade or water. The Crunch holds secrets and danger. I quested for ruins of my ancestors. The people who survive bring back history, worth more than the trinkets of gold or gems some other places could hold.

  These places hold only the corpses of countless men and animal alike. Layers of dead and ones who are not dead.

  See, I get your attention after all.

  The road to the tomb is not worth recounting. For others, maybe. Not for me. Black slabs of stone, cool in the sun. Even my hand pale against the columns. The tombs of the Crunch hum. The veins of the world run thick near the sea. They feed the land, but not like water feeds the soil, but like mana feeds life.

  The air is always cool inside the tombs, yet dry. It preserves whatever has been laid inside, no matter how long it has lain there. I searched for secrets to learn magic. Magic has been lost and rediscovered before, the ones who brought back the secrets becoming the greatest of our heroes.

  I cared not for glory or for being a hero. I would accept the honor, but I wanted the secrets for my own reasons. You have to reach to grasp. There’s no shame in ambition, so I stepped into the tomb. From the sun, into the cold.

  Drops of water don’t fall in the tombs. The walls are polished stone and the wind carries water, but it does not let it go. The tombs suck the air in, a perpetual greedy inhale. There’s light down there. The walls sparkle and glow from within, except where someone has chiseled off fragments of the black stone, to flaunt, to prove their daring.

  The stone is said to be the same everywhere, so all the slivers come from the first couple of steps inside. The walls gnawed ragged by scavengers, not risking going further in. Third step and the walls are untouched by time or hand.

  I went further. One hundred, one thousand steps.

  The tomb was a single corridor. Stretching and angling, except when turning sharply. There are no traps. These are no treasure chambers of vain kings or jealous wizards. The tombs are fossils of unknown people, black bones of the past, left jutting in the white sand. Unfathomable.

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  ”I wonder if they actually could have been built underwater,” Mandollel says. “Do your stories tell how old they are? Do they look like there’s a clear floor and a ceiling or are the corridors uniform?”

  I said they are unfathomable. No questions before the story is over.

  Deep, the dead lie against the treasures. Vaults, sealed. Doors, heaped under the masses of the dead. Things have crawled to the tombs to die for ages, but not all stay dead.

  I had travelled the corridors for days. I rested when tired, ate when hungry. Soon I would have to turn back, to tend for my steed left outside, if nothing else. Then, the first walking carcass finally met me with broken and brown teeth, lunging with maw open, large as a man’s torso. A sea creature, the likes of which do not live anymore. Flesh hung off it, bones sticky with rot, a dull glow to its insides.

  I had listened to it approach for minutes. Anticipation is always worse than whatever happens. The carcass fell apart with a single strike of my sword. Back then, I carried an even larger blade, to challenge myself. It crushed the bone and parted rotted flesh, spilling the glowing rot on the floor.

  Nothing lives in the tombs, but things don’t die, either. Deeper down, the floor glows brighter. Blue light pulses from below, like the heart of a giant. Life and death are equally banished.

  I reached the vault hall. Every explored tomb has had one. Under and around my feet, refuse of the dead. Every step a struggle through rot and bone. The air clear and crisp, warm wind snapping at my back, blowing ever deeper. More dead rose to meet me. Dozens of shambling shapes. Some humanoid, most animal.

  I cut my path through them to reach the final vault… what?

  ”Just like that? Give us something, you lunk!”

  Rworg opens a single eye to frown at Finna and I nod vigorously at him. I want to hear more as well, even if I have no idea if any of what he talks can be real to begin with. Dead things don’t just come to life. Well, if you don’t count teratomes. So maybe it is possible, after all?

  I cut the first in half, the second in half, but the third into three separate parts before it stopped moving. Happy now? They were dead. Slow, barely held together by wet flesh and brittle bone. I was young, full of vim. They were no match.

  Yet more things stirred and rose from below the muck to grab at me. They sensed movement or hated life or objected to their peace being disturbed. I broke them, one by one. The magic that held them together and moved their limbs spilled out. The blood glowed blue, washing the entire hall with its glow.

  We have no explanation why the tombs are as they are. They don’t look built as much as grafted into the world. Why do they attract the dead? Why do the dead rise up? Questions without answers. Quiet, elf. I’m not interested in your guesses or theories.

  No, we will not discuss it later.

  The vault doors are all alike. The two that I have heard of and this one that I pushed open. They take two men to move, or me. A small square area was behind it, with a pedestal in the middle, with a slab in the middle of the pedestal. The room inside was dim and red like blood. Only speck of color in the tomb. I reached my hand inside, but it felt like pushing it into honey. There was first a pressure at my wrist and when I pulled my hand back, it was swollen and aching, blood packed into every finger.

  So I ran in as quickly as I could.

  What? I said I was young back then. I planned to grab the slab and throw myself out, but there was no pressure, no honey. Only a lurch that passed through my body, like falling from somewhere high for one moment but not the second. The light inside the vault was not red after all, but the exact same blue as everywhere else. I wondered how that could be, but then looked outside of the door, back to the hall.

  It bathed in bright blue light. After the gloom, it hurt my eyes. Corpses rose and squirmed and rushed. I had left them in pieces, unable to move, but as I watched, the pieces started twitching and met with each other, forming a single hulking collection of body parts, animal and human alike. The movement was unnatural, fast beyond comprehension.

  I took a step back and during that single step, the monster rushed to the door, filling it completely. It had two legs and two arms made of corpses, hung on a body of a large monkey. Thick and wide, a patchwork creature of rot. My way out was blocked. The strike came too quickly to see or react, arm thick as a tree trunk thrust into the room. The dead had been slow, but this was fast. Incredibly so.

  My sword was ready, but the arm slapped it and me aside. The strike was too fast to dodge and too strong to block. It threw me into the back wall. The arm ripped off the monster from the strength of the punch. Ancient tendons snapping like badly sewn stitches. It flopped into the room, landing on my chest. The fingers inside the meat tried to grip my throat, but I lifted it above my head and slammed it on the ground. It was a slab of meat, now weak and slow.

  Behind the monster, more things were pulling themselves together. The muck bubbled as corpses surfaced and started to twitch.

  I could not tarry, not here.

  Out of all the places in the world, not here.

  such a hard time with Rworg's story, but at the end I was actually very happy how it turned out. Writing Rworg is also just super fun ??